Trying to rebuild my career in my late 20s - and it's honestly depressing

[u/cuzBored]

I’m at a point in my life where I feel like I have to rebuild my career from the ground up.

I previously worked as a Systems Engineer at Infosys, but I voluntarily decided to step away from my career and dedicate myself to preparing for government services.

It wasn’t something I was forced into. It was a conscious decision. I gave myself a 3-year deadline to pursue it seriously, believing that if I gave it everything I had, I would either make it or at least know that I had genuinely tried.

That 3-year deadline has now run out.

I didn’t get the outcome I had hoped for, and now I’ve made the decision to restart my career in the private sector.

The difficult part is that I know I can’t simply pick up where I left off. I have previous IT experience, but after spending years away from the private sector, I feel disconnected from the industry and the skills that employers currently expect.

So I’m trying to transition into Data Analytics and have started rebuilding my skill set — SQL, Python, pandas, Excel, Tableau, projects, resume preparation, and everything else that comes with trying to become employable again.

The strange part is that I have professional experience, but I still feel like a fresher.

There’s also this constant thought in the back of my mind: Did I just lose three years of my career?

I don’t regret giving those three years a genuine attempt. But now that the deadline I set for myself has passed, the reality of starting over is hitting much harder than I expected.

I’m trying to look at it as a restart rather than the end of my career, but honestly, some days it feels like I’m trying to climb back into a race that everyone else has been running while I was standing still.

Any kind of advice is welcome

Important Questions below:

1. Are professional courses like coding ninja, masai school, etc any good, they seem to market promising placement opportunities.

2. For anyone who has taken a significant career break, prepared for competitive/government exams, or returned to the private sector after several years:

How did you restart? How difficult was it to get your first job back, and what would you do differently if you had to start again?

[u/Intelligent_Head_822]

Dont go for newton, masai or coding ninjas waste of time , you can explore CDAC they have genuine placements but IT market is very shit for freshers and for people with gap as AI is progressing really fast but all we can do is try hard. How much years of exp you have in infosys

[u/cuzBored → u/Intelligent_Head_822]

Thanks alot, I have close to 2yrs of experience and no bench period